250 Patents That Built America — Many Wouldn't Survive §101 Today
Lincoln, Monopoly, the red Solo cup, and the patents behind AI: America's 250 years told through the patent record.
“The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius…”
— Abraham Lincoln, 1859
As America approached its 250th birthday, I started thinking that Voice of IP should mark the occasion. Most of what I discuss on Clause 8 is the machinery of the patent world — the USPTO, the Hill, the courts, corporate IP strategy, new models for monetization, etc. But that machinery exists for one reason that’s often easy to lose sight of: innovation. So I decided that Voice of IP would put together a list of 250 American innovations, one for each year of the country, each tied to a US patent. I figured it would be a quick, easy project.
It was far more complicated than I expected. But working through those complications forced me to confront the messiness of innovation, patents, business, history—and lists like this one. Many of the discoveries and disputes I encountered appear in the “Notes” column of the table below. These were the broader themes that stayed with me:
Looking back, the current state of patent eligibility seems wildly ahistorical. This is the one that made me repeatedly sit back and think about how we have ended up in a very different place from when many of the innovations on the list were patented. Google’s PageRank patent, Netflix’s DVD-by-mail patent, Elon Musk’s business directory patent for his first company Zip2, and Jack Dorsey’s patent on tweeting have mostly expired but, at the time the applications were filed, they covered technologies and business models that became foundational to some of the biggest business empires in America. If filed today, they would likely all have trouble surviving the §101 gauntlet — facing rejection at the USPTO and, if issued, possible invalidation in the courts.
The same shift appears at the other end of the technological spectrum. Cohen and Boyer’s recombinant-DNA patent helped launch the modern biotechnology industry — Stanford and UCSF licensed it to roughly 470 companies — and it issued in 1980, three decades before the Supreme Court in Myriad held that isolated genes are unpatentable products of nature. PCR became a foundational technique underlying countless modern genetic tests. But diagnostic methods built around such testing now run headlong into Mayo v. Prometheus, which in 2012 recast correlating a biomarker to optimize treatment of autoimmune diseases, like Crohn’s, as an unpatentable “law of nature.” Whether the specific claims on these foundational patents would have survived today is unclear. The country patented its way to biotech under rules it has since walked back, which is why Senators Tillis and Coons have spent years trying to restore broader statutory eligibility.
That's largely true of patents for earlier innovations on the list too. The Monopoly patent anchored Parker Brothers' fortune; today, a patent on game rules would be dead on arrival. The Piggly Wiggly patent — Clarence Saunders's "self-serving store," the ancestor of every supermarket — would almost certainly be routed to a business-method art unit and buried under §101 rejections in today’s USPTO regardless of what the claims actually recite. Two iconic American commercial innovations might never have benefited from the fuel of interest the patent system was meant to provide.
Deciding who invented something is genuinely hard. History is murky, and the person a story remembers is often not the person on the patent. The foundational Solo Cup patent names an inventor almost nobody has heard of — Clarence Brewer — not the Solo Cup company scion — Robert Hulseman — celebrated in every obituary as the inventor of the “red Solo Cup.” George Mitchell is called the father of fracking, but the man who invented and patented hydraulic fracturing decades earlier was a Stanolind engineer named Riley Floyd Farris. Sometimes the famous name belongs to the businessman rather than the engineer who quietly invented and moved on to solving the next technical problem. Because this list is tied to patents, we went with the inventors named on the patents and tried to note where the patent record and the folklore diverge.
Every list like this reflects choices — including this one. Who gets into a hall of fame, who gets remembered as “the” inventor, which technologies count: those are choices, and there’s no perfect way to make them. I want to be upfront about that. There are millions of US patents and we chose 250. So, I’ve resisted calling these the “greatest” American inventions. It’s a snapshot of the innovation that happened here, told through the patent system that recorded it. And taken together, the stories are also a reminder of what can happen when people have the freedom—and the incentive—to pursue an idea. One pattern was impossible to miss: a remarkable number of the named inventors on this list were immigrants.
Commercial success makes patents targets. Once an invention becomes popular, someone often tries to design around, narrow, invalidate, or otherwise take down the patent protecting it. That’s another clear theme running through the whole list. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patents survived roughly 600 lawsuits. Robert Kearns fought Detroit for a decade over the intermittent wiper and won. Others were challenged and weren’t as lucky in the courts. But losing in court does not erase the underlying invention. Those inventors remained on the list even as the legal disputes sometimes made the judgment calls harder.
What struck me most is how little this has changed overall: the independent inventor who has to fight to enforce a patent isn't a modern problem. It's the oldest story in the system — Bell was living it in the 1870s, and many inventors are living it today.
American invention has two prominent faces, and both are on this list. One is the lone inventor — the widow, the machinist, the professor, the founder — with nothing behind them but a patent. The other is the corporate research lab: the same names surface again and again—Bell Labs, IBM, DuPont, 3M, GE—institutions that made invention systematic and gave their researchers the resources to develop, commercialize, and defend their work. The list reflects both traditions, along with many other American companies that built enduring businesses around patented innovation.
A note on method. This is a list of innovations tied to US patents — a deliberate choice. Some great American inventions found other routes to success. And we made no pretense of ranking impact — there's no made-up formula here scoring inventions against each other. Instead, we tried to tell two stories at once: the story of significant American innovation, and the story of how Americans have relied on the patent system to protect it, which is why the list includes inventors like Abraham Lincoln and Howard Lutnick and some personal favorites that have simply made us smile (the wine chiller is staying).
We also folded in the milestone “millionth” patents—1,000,000 through 11,000,000—as snapshots of what America was patenting each time the odometer rolled over. No. 12,000,000 exists, of course. But every list needs an ending, and the age of AI suggested a more fitting one. It took 121 years to reach the first million, in 1911; the most recent million took only about three. The recent milestones are worth a second look because the USPTO now hand-selects which patent receives the round number, making each one a statement by the Office about what counts as “important” innovation.
The list opens with US Patent X1 — a method for making potash, personally signed in 1790 by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Edmund Randolph — and runs to the transformer architecture that now underpins frontier AI models.
250 years, 250 inventions.
All 250 are in the table below. If you’re reading in email or in Substack app, open the full post in browser to view every entry.